I Got It (Part II)

By Doug Bills Wednesday, January 23, 2002 Well I've just set up my domain name (www.bills.co.nz) at Register Direct and I have to say that I'm impressed. It was so easy to set up. It took me about five minutes and this included setting up 6 POP3 (email) accounts. You are allowed to have up to ten POP3 accounts - very impressive for a free service! Redirecting My URL   Above, is a screen shot of me re-directing my domain name, bills.co.nz, to the URL of where it is actually stored, http://www.aienvironments.com/bills_family. This means that I can store the files that make up my web site anywhere on the internet. I already had my business site set up so I have (temporarily) stored the family files in a folder (bills_family) there and pointed my domain name at that folder. You'll notice in the screen shot that there is a cloaking device. No... this is not just for Trekies :-) When you are browsing the Web, the URL of the current page shows in the Address Box of the browser. But I don't want my visitors to see http://www.aienvironments.com/bills_family/index.html. So, what I can do is tell the redirection to cloak the URL with my original domain name. this means that no matter where the visitor browses on my site, they will only see http://www.bills.co.nz in the Address Box... Cool eh? What about the free sites? Good question. There are a number of places on the web that offer to host your site for free. One of the most popular is Geocities. This might be worth a look if you are just starting out. There is a major drawback with these sites however. They aren't really hosting your site for free because a whole lot of advertising is dumped on your site. It's not too bad but some visitors get impatient if ads keep popping up all the time. Register Direct offer to host your site for $99pa - that's $8.25 per month (plus GST of course). This gives you 10MB of storage space but doesn't give you much else (such as dynamic web content). But at least it gets rid of the adds on your site and that might be all you need to start with. Doug Bills is founder of AI Environments - a company developing environments having Artificial Intelligence.

My host (as well as ISP) is Netaccess. They offer a range of hosting services for various types of sites. I chose a fairly costly service (the WEBADVANCED option @ $69.95/mth) for my business as I will be using some of the more advanced services such as ASP, scripting and database access.

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